Mother's story touches universal themes

December 05, 2004|By Jessica Reaves, Tribune staff reporter.

There's a moment in all our lives when we realize our parents won't be around forever. For most of us, that insight leads to a transient sense of sadness, or perhaps the onset of a midlife crisis. Ronne Hartfield had a more productive response: She started writing down the stories of her mother's life.

"I admired my mother so much," Hartfield said in an interview, "and I was very conscious that so many of the influences that made my mother what she was, that defined so many in her generation--a sense of life not being easy, a lack of entitlement--were disappearing."

Hartfield, 58, a senior research fellow in religion and art at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, set out to capture those increasingly dated concepts for her own children and grandchildren. "So many kids have no concept of what it was like to just work and work for no reward but money--working so hard just to survive." So she began asking her mother questions about her life, taking down the stories and listening to history unfold.

What emerged from those stories is "Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family," a book that is biography at its most generous--a warm, sometimes humorous and always unsparing look back at the life of Day Shepherd, as Hartfield's mother was called--and at the struggles encountered by so many black and mixed-race Americans.

It quickly became evident that this narrative, once intended for Hartfield's family, spoke to universal themes: racism, community and love.

"At some point in the writing process, as I was talking to people about what I was doing, or when friends would come with me to visit my mother, it occurred to me that this was a story that would have meaning for a broader audience than just my own children," said Hartfield, former Woman's Board endowed executive director of museum education at the Art Institute and former executive director of Chicago-based Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education.

Day, whose father was a white plantation owner and whose mother was the mixed-race daughter of a former slave, epitomized, Hart-field said, the immigrant experience in Chicago.

"Whether people were immigrating from Europe or up from the South, there was always a need to find a community of people 'like me,' " she said. "And it was certainly true that in the black community here, where everyone figured that one drop of black blood made you black, there was a great sense of nurturing, of being defined by the people who cared about you and for you." Her mother never experienced a sense of not belonging to the black community, Hartfield said, despite her appearance, which would have allowed her to pass as white.

Even as things changed around her--through the tumultuous 1950s and '60s, the civil rights movement, the racism that so often emerged, Day Shepherd maintained "an extreme fluidity," Hartfield said. "She had to go through so much, adjust to so many things: financial and social changes, everything. She would just look around, and say, 'Well, that's certainly interesting.' " And then she got on with her life.

One of the qualities Hartfield seems to admire most in Day was her ability to make her own community. When Day moved to Beverly to live with another daughter, she wasn't uncomfortable because the majority of her new neighbors were white. "She was uncomfortable because there weren't enough people out on the streets," Hartfield said. "It wasn't what she was used to--going through her day and seeing and talking to all kinds of people. That's what she liked to do."

Eventually Day made characteristic inroads into her new surroundings, seeking out new friends, forging her own community.